“The High Court is now in session for September hearings. God Save the Queen!” the voice is shrill and Australian in equal measure. I had only brought away one pair of jeans and after two weeks drinking in clubhouses and bars with bikies I was aware they smelled. I had grown a beard and looked rough. I was conscious of those sitting next to me. My head was pounding. I pulled out my pen and starting taking notes.

The Milperra Massacre may have been the beginning. I don’t actually know but it’s as good a place as any to start. On September 2, 1984, members of the Bandidos and Comancheros sought a decisive end to an increasingly vicious dispute. The showdown at a British motorcycle swap meet was the culmination of on-going ill-will between the two groups, and the car park outside the Viking Tavern erupted as the patched men clashed head on. The battle was not over quickly, nor was it centralised and pockets of fierce fighting broke out in different places. Knives, baseball bats, chains. Guns filled the air with noise, smoke and bullets. When both sides called time, seven people were dead. The bikies had left an indelible scar on Australian history. Laws around firearms changed in the aftermath of Milperra, but over the years the legislative thrust targeting the bikies increased, notably in South Australia, New South Wales, and now Queensland.

The Queensland measures have gone further than all before them. In fact, 30 years since the Milperra massacre it is the legislation and not the bikies raising the most concern. Numerous people have come to the defence of the outlaw clubs, not least of whom is Tony Fitzgerald QC who headed the Fitzgerald inquiry into political corruption around Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen in the late 1980s. About the bikie laws he has been vociferous in his opposition: “History teaches us that claims that repressive laws will reduce serious crime are usually hollow and that laws which erode individual freedom and expand a state's power over its citizens are fraught with peril.”

Peril Indeed, the laws in a nutshell

Under the laws, patched clubs can be declared illegal by political decree, and they have no right to defend themselves. It just happens. If they go to their clubhouse or meet in groups of three or more they will be arrested, bail is forbidden, and those caught will serve a mandatory term of 6 months in prison. If a member wears any regalia denoting membership in a pub the same regime applies.

Furthermore, if a club member commits certain crimes, and there are armfuls of them, he gets the punishment imposed by that crime plus an additional 15 years or, if he is an office holder in the club, an additional 25 years in prison.

If, for example, a person commits a relatively minor crime and is sentenced to two years in prison, if he was a club member he would instead serve either 17 or 27 years. Swap the term ‘club member’ for any other group or association in society and the theoretical underpinnings of this legislation become sinister, and hence some of the concern.

But here’s the kicker, it is not just club members at risk. In December 2013, a woman and her partner, a member of the Life and Death Motorcycle Club, were having a drink with another member in a pub in Dayboro. All three, including the woman, were locked up.  A librarian who had been awarded the Lord Mayor’s Award for her actions during the 2011 Brisbane flood disaster, she had never before been in trouble with the law but nevertheless found herself in prison for having a drink with her partner and a friend. It is only one of numerous egregious examples of these laws at work. Research shows that 60 percent of those arrested under the laws are non-club members, and that 42 percent of all charges were minor in nature, including drug and utensil possession, breach of bail, and unlicensed driving. In one instance a group of five men were arrested while buying ice creams.

Of concern to many is the fact that the definitions of an illegal organisation make no mention of motorcycle clubs or patch wearing clubs or any such thing. There is no guarantee it won’t be used against other groups that become seen to be troublesome, particularly protest groups.

In the winter cold of Christchurch I looked across the Tasman and wondered if all of this could actually be true. I set off on a trip around Australia to look at the country’s laws and to meet those affected by them. I started in South Australia before hitting New South Wales and then making my way to Queensland. 

The trial begins

And so there I was, at the Federal Courthouse in Brisbane courtroom number one, for the latest test of gang legislation. In the balance are two paths. One is a return to sanity. The other will mean that similar laws spread with the relentless drive of an Aussie bush fire and invariably jump the ditch to New Zealand and perhaps beyond. Great minds think alike, so they say. And so do defective ones.

There are more salubrious courtrooms than Courtroom 1, but there is enough here to give it gravitas: the wigs, the gowns, the bowing and the respectful disagreements – all of that behaviour that separates the judiciary from the legislative branch, with the childish and angry debates of politicians. The seven young clerks pull back seven chairs and in walk seven judges. Four men. Three women. All white.  

In front of them are the lawyers. Acres of them. The plaintiff, Stefan Kuczborski, is a member of Hells Angels. A man with only a minor drug possession conviction, he is being used to test the law. The legal bill for the clubs alone is around a million dollars. All of the clubs are chipping in and they have raffled motorcycles. There are three lawyers including the tall and tattooed Wayne Baffsky who has been on the Hells Angels side on numerous scraps and is yet to lose one, and Ken Fleming QC who is leading the team.

They are dwarfed by the defence team, made up of the Solicitor General of Queensland, the Solicitor General of the Commonwealth, and the Solicitors General of five other states who have shown up in solidarity. With their hangers-on I count 15 of them. 

This is how the armies line up, and Fleming fires the first shots. With his face plastered brown by Brisbane’s sun, and with a dignified manner he tears and pulls at the legislation as an old woman might untangle mistakes in her knitting. Piece by piece until it unravels at his feet.

Of the seven judges one stands out. Judge Hayne. At times he looks bored and disinterested. Tell me something I don’t know, his disposition seems to say. And it appears he knows a lot. He quotes the laws down to the sub section as well as precedents from memory. When he talks he does so purposely, and in a way that is intelligent and imposing. His questions are like demands. It is a manner that could only have been caned into him by a private school education and impeccable learning. 

“What is the proposition that underpins the “cannot”,’ he asks at one point. 

At the heart of the plaintiffs argument is the legal precedent set down by Kable, a celebrated case that has been used in court cases involving motorcycle clubs before. If you want to know more about that, I’m not your man. In a nutshell, though, the primary argument is equality before the law. If two people commit the same offense, why should they be treated differently just because they belong to a motorcycle club?  As Fleming puts it, “Relevant cases should be treated as identical”

The Solicitor-General of Queensland, Peter Dunning, is the first to rise in the defence of the laws. Younger than Flemming, his thick-rimmed glasses make him look more academic than legal, although even I’m not sure what I mean by that. His was a remarkable oratory effort. Here was a man who spoke for over an hour without so much as the slightest flicker of charisma. The substance of his argument was around the freedom of the legislature to make laws it sees fit and that the check and balance is the voting public.

“There undoubtedly would be those who not only would say; have said, that they think such laws are unhelpful or ineffective”, Dunning said. He then concluded that “this is ultimately a political inquiry”. 

In other words, the politicians would prefer that the judiciary mind its own business. 

At a certain point Dunning was asked by Judge Bell what would happen if the Plaintiff and two other members of his club were in the courtroom. After prevaricating for a while, Dunning conceded that all three would be arrested and charged – meaning no bail and a mandatory six month sentence. At that point I’m pretty sure a single eyebrow on each of the judges raised in collective surprise. Only Judge Hayne looked unmoved.

The rest of the defence lawyers who gave oral submissions identified small points to attack, it was well coordinated but unremarkable, except for the Solicitor General for Western Australia Grant Donaldson, who, after being asked questions he couldn’t answer, sat down, suggesting he would take the “coward’s way out” and allow the Solicitor General for Queensland to address them. They were never answered.

The mistaken premise

So after a day and a bit in court, still in dirty jeans and now drinking beer in the hotel bar I’m reading through copious notes, trying to make sense of all of this and two things are clear to me, the first is I’m a bit homesick and the second is all of these arguments are almost beside the point. That’s not to say that they’re not important. Obviously they are, the whole case rests on them, but the crux of this issue actually rests not on legal arguments but on a fundamental misunderstanding. And that annoys me as much as it does anybody, because I’d like to go to bed. 

If you look at the arguments around the justification for legislation you can clearly see references to organised crime. One of the judges made an analogy about the mafia. The defence lawyers often mentioned organised criminal groups. Organised crime, organised, crime, organised crime.

But here’s the trick. The bikie clubs are not organised crime groups. It is a basic matter of fact that these clubs formed for reasons other than crime – it was bikes, brotherhood, birds and booze. Even the cops acknowledge there was nothing more than that. Over the years the picture has become murkier. Now, certainly, club members are more likely to be criminally inclined in profit-driven crime than the average Joe, but such crime is the work of individuals within groups not the groups as a collective. The original creed of the clubs still stands. Many people will be sceptical of this claim, but it is undeniably true. The reasons for this are based on greed (individual crooks don’t want to share their profits with the whole); laziness or prudence (some members can’t be bothered or are disinclined to enter the fray); and a desire for organisational survival: the groups know that if they commit crimes collectively then one police bug or rotten informant could bring the whole group down in one fell swoop. If it does happen, it is the exception rather than the rule. If it does happen, there has hardly been a skerrick of evidence to support it. It doesn’t happen.

And this is why the Queensland legislation works by political decree; they wouldn’t get it on facts. 

This is important. If the crimes are committed by members rather than the group itself, then getting rid of the group won’t stop the crime: it will simply be undertaken by the same individuals who no longer belong to the group. Therefore, nothing changes, meaning nothing is gained. 

Notwithstanding that there have been some cracking bikie brawls in recent times that have only occurred because such clubs exist. The ‘Ballroom Blitz’ in 2006, a violent brawl between the Finks and the Hells Angels which was particularly vicious and caught on camera, captured the public’s imagination. And the incident of the Bandidos fracas on the Gold Coast in 2013, as over-hyped as it was, was enough to spark the latest legislative effort in Queensland. 

These are issues that the public, the police and politicians have every right to be concerned about. Nobody, then, is saying the bikies aren’t an issue. Without doubt they are a law and order concern from time-to-time. The boogieman, however, they are not. 

I have met a lot of bikies on my trip to Australia. I drank my way through three states. Here, as is the case at home, there are rascals among them, of course. A minority are hard core criminal. Most are just people. I’d love to tell you different, to hype this story, to give you salacious details, but I’d be making it up. Some people may believe that I’ve been hoodwinked. I’ll bet you anything you like those people will never have met one. Ignorance rules the roost when it comes to this subject.

Still, why take my word for it when Dr Terry Goldworthy of Bond University, a former high-ranking cop, has compiled some statistics. They show that during the period the legislation has been in place, police have seized $200,000 worth of drugs. When that is divided by the number of people arrested it shows that each person could have earned around $260 per month, an amount that he says is “hardly the stuff high rollers are made of”. Furthermore, the violence that heralded the laws is all but non-existent in the data, with club members – including associates – making up just 0.06 percent of reported assaults during the period under study. What’s more, and perhaps most surprisingly, the majority of club members in Queensland have no criminal convictions at all.

So why all the fuss? Two reasons, I would argue: the first is that the clubs are obvious and thus an easy target, and the second is that they deliver the politicians their drugs of choice: votes.

The real rationale

Bikies in Australia, and gangs of all hues in New Zealand, have become political tools with which politicians can gain electoral advantage. Ramp up the gang issues, seem tough on law and order and get public support. It is a winning formula. 

In New Zealand we can actually see its genesis. Before the 1972 election Norman Kirk promised to ‘take the bikes off the bikies’. He won the election. Game on. Australia has had similar experiences: Mike Rann in South Australia, Nathan Rees in NSW and now Campbell Newman in Queensland, the mastermind of this latest folly who has moved with a force greater than all of those who have proceeded him. Clearly he has learned nothing from the others who had their laws struck down by the courts. I don’t know the politics of Queensland. It may well be that Newman is a brilliant thinker and honest man in all other areas, but in this case at least he’s definitely not one of these and probably not both.

Newman has used the old recipe of create a big problem, provide an answer, and gain public support. It is as obvious as it is unimaginative. But it continues to work, insomuch as it garners electoral advantage. This is not a great comment on democracy. Yet the judiciary are not politicians. Their job is done with a sober rationality and an eye on justice.

The concerns of the plaintiff’s lawyers are that the judiciary is very conservative. Be that as it may, this legislation will fall over, not least because it encroaches on judicial freedoms – no judges, however conservative, like that. Furthermore, I back logic over rhetoric. I think intelligence trumps ignorance. I believe the bikies will defeat Newman. And that will be a just and right result. 

The cost will be to the people already caught up in these draconian measures, the families who have suffered. Many of you will have little sympathy here; few will care for the bikies and those who surround them. So perhaps people will focus on the cost to the taxpayer whose money has been burnt by political folly on measures that tampered with fundamental rights of citizens for no real gain. 

As I look back on what I have written now, and at all of my notes, which are long and often illegible I realised that I’d come to Australia to find out something strange, frightening and new. These laws promised all of that but in the end I found that underpinning them all was just the same old story. 

We have more to fear from idiot politicians than we do from most crooks.

Ten minutes or so before I posted my blog yesterday proving the Police and Corrections Minister had used dodgy gang numbers, David Farrar wrote something akin to an apology on Kiwiblog for attacking me for exposing the truth. He was getting the jump on criticism coming his way.

Was this a coincidence? Of course not. He was tipped off by the Minister’s office following an inquiry by the the Herald's ever diligent David Fisher just an hour or so before Farrar posted. Tolley’s press secretary is a man named Gillon Carruthers. Leaked emails used in Dirty Politics show that Carruthers has been providing material to Farrar’s offside Cameron Slater since 2011. Old habits obviously die hard.

Not that Carruthers will admit it, of course, and if he does he will undoubtedly say that he was just apologising to Farrar for sending him false information in the first place. That’s obviously a sop, though, why only apologise to Farrar? Why not to the public for misleading them when launching important policy before the election? Furthermore, any apology to Farrar would only prove he previously leaked him the original information so that he could attack me. 

When I wrote in my blog that I used somebody else to send in the Official Information request because I was concerned the fact I was doing so would be leaked to Farrar or others (to whatever end), I thought I might be seen as paranoid. To be honest, I thought I might have been too. Unfortunately it appears not.

It is already quite clear that numerous people have been attacked by Slater, Farrar, often at the behest of government ministers or those working for them. This is not a small matter, it is about how we want our democracy to operate.

After the revelations of Dirty Politics, it might have been assumed these practices were halted. It seems that they haven’t been. Cameron Slater said to me last week on Twitter ‘wait until you see Dirtier Politics’. The worst, it would seem, is yet to come.

Can somebody, anybody, in the media please ask the Minister of Police and Corrections, or even better the Prime Minister, if they continue to think that this is acceptable practice? Are they happy establishing two tiers of information flow: a secret and efficient one for propaganda and a slow and risky one for the truth?

Please ask them if academics and journalists should have to hide our identities when asking for government information so that it’s not leaked to people like Slater and Farrar?

These seem to be reasonable questions, the answers to which have grave ramifications. I implore the Forth Estate to ask them.

In the lead up to the election the Minister of Corrections Anne Tolley launched a gang policy. In order to justify the government’s approach she used gang figures that overstated the gang problem. Not by a little bit, but a lot. And I mean a lot. I couldn’t prove it at the time (I can now) but because they were so obviously nonsense I called her out and said I would eat a suitcase full of carrots if she was correct.

Carrots proved to be the least of my problems. My problem proved to be the dishonest Right Wing blogger David Farrar. I initially took Farrar’s challenge in good humour thinking it would be a healthy tussle to seek the truth. It wasn’t. As we know now, he and Cameron Slater are birds of a feather, but where Slater is dim-witted Farrar is marginally smarter and this makes him more insidious.

Farrar quickly leapt to the Minister’s Defence. He was able to gain the figures – presumably from the Minister’s office – and with them he attempted to ‘prove’ that I was wrong and discredit me. Sound familiar? It was my own little experience of Dirty Politics.

Farrar was resolute in saying that he expected the New Zealand Herald to cover the story of me eating carrots – the Herald having republished my initial blog on their website.

When I retorted and pointed out that I wasn’t wrong he went on the attack again with a second blog, audaciously saying that I had ‘conceded’ the argument. It was an Orwellian fiction attacking my integrity, but the real nastiness came from Farrar’s followers on Kiwiblog where I was rounded on and vilified. Because my blog is read by a small number of people and his by a very large number, most people read his side. To the vast majority of people, then, I had conceded, was wrong and therefore ripe to be attacked. Farrar had done his job. The Minister was forgotten, I was now the one trying to mislead the people.  I was being discredited by mischief and fiction, not by facts and reasoned argument.

I was reading this, hardly believing what was happening.

By this stage, of course, Farrar almost certainly knew he was wrong, but right and wrong is not his concern. His only concern is a political agenda – protect and promote the National party, no matter what the truth is. Deceive and mislead the public, shut up opponents, bury the truth, twist the facts. These are things my training deplores. In fact my last piece on the Minister was praising her work with the Department of Corrections, and I contract to do research for them – and I can’t imagine this helps me getting more – but my only concern is the truth.

I was correct and I have the evidence to prove it. The Minister’s figures were utterly misleading and designed to create a massive problem for political advantage.

It took a while to get the evidence because I had to use the Official Information Act (OIA). I don’t have the privileged position of Farrar to get data on demand. I was going to try, but I thought better of it. In fact, I didn’t even submit the OIA, I got a colleague to, because if Farrar knew this post was coming I couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t have continued to attack me. Call me paranoid, but this is exactly how certain Ministers, Slater and Farrar operate. There is undisputed evidence supporting this outlined in Dirty Politics. People can write off Hager if they want to, but they can’t write off the evidence. I recommend everybody read his book.

For the record: the Minister said there were 4,000 gang members in New Zealand. She also said that gang members make up 28 percent of New Zealand’s prison population (meaning only 1,650 are left on the street). Yet in the first quarter of 2014 they were nevertheless said to have been charged with:

• 34 per cent of class A/B drug offences
• 36 per cent of kidnapping and abduction offences
• 25 per cent of aggravated robbery/robbery offences
• 26 per cent of grievous assault offences
  

While I could be nit picky and point out that the number of gang members is just less than 4,000 and that that number includes all prospects (not mentioned by the Minister), but that’s neither here nor there in the scheme of things. The real deception is that the crime data included not just gang members and prospects, but a much wider cohort. According to police the ‘gang’ data also included those who:

• Were charged together with a New Zealand adult (meaning ‘patched’)  gang member for the same offence
• Had an identified familial tie with a New Zealand adult gang member
• Had an identified connection to a New Zealand adult gang member
  

In short, then, the 4,000 figure (leaving aside the incarcerated nonsense which only inflates the ridiculousness) is suddenly bolstered by all those people charged with a gang member, any family member of a gang member, and any other person who has an association with a gang member.

So how big has this group become? This the police didn’t know, or at least didn’t tell me, so let’s ask how many family members and friends each gang member has? In the past the police association has estimated a ratio of one gang member for every 10 associates, but that seems low based on the above criteria. Nevertheless, let’s stick with that for argument’s sake. That means we need to divide the percentage of crimes undertaken by gangs by a factor of 10. That means instead of the 4,000 gang members committing, for example, the 34 percent of class A/B drug offences cited by the Minister becomes just 3.4 percent: maybe slightly more but potentially considerably less than that.*

Farrar might well argue that it doesn’t matter, that gang members and associates, and family members, are all just as guilty as one another, but that’s not what the Minister said, she said the very small number were responsible for a very large number of crimes. Clearly that is not true.

This isn’t a referendum on whether or not you like gangs; it’s an argument for the truth. If a river is 34 percent polluted it’s going to take a much different solution than if it’s 3.4 percent polluted. If your finance manager told you your bad debts were 34 percent, that’s a very different problem than if the actual figure is 3.4 percent. When you inflate a problem multiple times it will entirely change the way you think about it, the means by which you tackle it, and the urgency with which you must move.

This isn’t to say gangs aren’t a problem, but they aren’t the problem the Minister was portraying. And this was my intention, to highlight the truth.

Now, I’m a durable enough bloke and can take a bit of grief, but it was frustrating and I was concerned about my reputation. Yet there are much bigger implications than the impacts on me. Many academics are reserved types, who will not want to speak out in an environment where they will be attacked. The questions then are these: do we want to silence academics trying to fulfil their role as the critics and conscience of society? When ministers are misleading the public, should we say nothing? Of course not, but these are the things Farrar is purposely trying to crush by foul means. 

I need to make it clear that I am not saying academics should not be questioned on their views because any decent academic will relish a good argument.  My point is that those connected to the corridors of power should not set out on a premeditated plan to stifle such debate with dishonest nonsense.

This isn’t an isolated incident. Farrar needs to be called out. He needs to be seen as a quisling to truth and an enemy of facts. His influence is undeniably negative.

Despite Farrar peddling fiction, he will still have been read by more people than me. In the minds of many I will always be wrong. Furthermore, the fact that the Minister misled the public is long forgotten. Like a puff of smoke the original concern disappears. This is David Farrar and Cameron Slater’s agenda. It is not in the country’s interest that we make it ours.

*we still don’t know the exact number without gaining the Police’s raw data, but at least we are now in the right ball park. The Police Association, in the last estimation I have seen, said gang associates measured 60,000. Using that number would further reduce the figures.

For a large group of people it doesn’t matter what allegations are made against John Key, Judith Collins and the government. No evidence will ever be enough, let’s look at Nixon.

In an effort at espionage, US president Richard Nixon orchestrated the illegal break-in of the democratic offices at the Watergate Hotel on June 17, 1972. By November 7 of that year, he was re-elected with the largest ever majority. A great number of voters were untroubled by the increasingly serious accusations against him.

Evidence already existed that linked the president to the criminal activity including a $25,000 cheque of Nixon’s team being banked by one of the burglars. Many people simply didn’t believe it could happen, some couldn’t be bothered looking at the evidence or more concerning simply didn’t care.

How did Nixon handle matters? Deny, deny, attack, deny, deny. ‘I am not a crook’, he declared in November 1973, and much of his support base believed him. By August 1974 the evidence was overwhelming. Nixon resigned in infamy yet even then opinion polls showed that at least 24 percent of the population – one in four voters – stood by their man. For true believers their leaders cannot do anything bad enough to be condemned. The party they support is more important than the democracy within which it exists.

The cerebrally limp Cameron Slater is reflective of the swathes of the righteous unthinking in New Zealand. These people are belligerent to the last, writing off all allegations targeting the Key government as nonsense, with most not troubling themselves to look at any of it. Knowing because they just know. Correct because they are too dim to see alternatives. Brush aside substance with ad hominem attacks. Whatever their side does, the other side is worse.

These are the people who to the very end would have voted for Nixon.  

There are others, though. Even Mathew Hooton, a man so National through-and-through that when he blushes he gets angry that his face doesn’t turn blue, has been critical of his party in the wake of allegations made in Dirty Politics. Some issues, he understands, are bigger than one election cycle, bigger than this particular and temporary manifestation of his party. Hooton remains one-eyed, but at least that eye is open.

Whatever your take on politics, whatever your take on who has made them, serious allegations have been made. By his own admission some are enough to make the prime minister resign if they are proven (not forgetting that the Justice Minister has already gone), and there is a prima facie case to more than a few of the charges. While John Key and those around him may be completely exonerated and it may be proven that none of these nefarious activities occurred, we should remain concerned that for a large percentage of the public it wouldn’t have mattered an ounce if they had. 

When I read that Cameron Slater, and his half-witted mate from the Tax Payers Union had referred to women in ugly and derogatory ways I was outraged. Outraged for them. We should never have known about it. And we should not judge them on it.

The Dirty Politics hack has been an important public service. It has highlighted disturbing issues as to how members of the National Government have operated, including almost without question the prime minister. Anybody who writes this off in glib or flippant terms is either ignorant or has something to hide.

But hacking people’s private communications is a serious matter. It isn’t something we should applaud. On the contrary, in fact, we should abhor such intrusions of privacy unless it is clearly in the public interest.

Cameron Slater and Jordan Williams’ personal conversations don’t hit that criteria. Not even close. It is a dangerous realm to enter. How many people have not said something to a friend that they wouldn’t say publically? I suspect few, if any.

As part of my job, from time to time, I read transcripts of conversations that have been surreptitiously (but legally) been recorded by police. What strikes, and always frightens the bejesus out of me, is that transcripts don’t pick up irony or jest. One doesn’t understand the relationship between the two talking parties. Often this can create a misleading understanding.

Saying that if women didn’t have cunts then men would throw rocks thrown at them is an ugly and puerile statement. But it’s also a joke meant for private consumption between people who are ribbing the opposite sex. And even if it’s more than that, we have no right to know.

I’ve said worse things to mates and one in particular: between us we purposely try to up the anti on offensive comments. Do I expect those things to be made public? No. Would I be horrified if they were? Yes I would.

There are numerous reasons to feel distain for Slater – he has a pathetic intellect, an un inquiring mind, and a nasty streak a mile long – and his nitwit mate, but those statements are not them. The great sociologist Erving Goffman talked about front stage and back stage life - dramaturgy, he called it – let’s not judge what people say privately unless we really need to. The alternative is that we all live with microphones on our pillow.

Travel broadens the mind, so they say. Not the way I do it. I’m on the road doing research in Australia, I’m forgetting as much as I learn. My client gave me an expense account.

With the notable exception of a roar around Adelaide on a V-Rod (accompanied by a fine ex pat kiwi) I’ve been happily cooped up in bars, drinking dens and hotel rooms. I had a bath the other morning and nearly drowned. It was a Tuesday.

Now all of this is for a good cause, and the research is incredibly important but before I report on my findings, here are what the Education Minister would call my interim "learnings": 

• I’ve learned that wherever you go, the Simpsons is always the best thing on TV. 
• I’ve learned that hotel soap is almost always sticky and un-latherable and that you should probably bring away more than one pair of pants.
• I’ve learned that I don’t miss the election campaign and that Andrew Williams being dropped from the New Zealand First list is information as cogent and important to me as a kid drawing on a wall in faeces.
• I can confirm that aeroplane seats are perfectly designed to ensure a living human being can’t sleep on them sober and without one's jaw slumping open and noises coming out. 
• I've learned that under a very specific condition minibar prices are not taken into consideration. That condition is laziness.
• I’ve scientifically discovered that my desire for Seafood Noodle Soup (no bean sprouts, no spring onions) from the Khmer Noodle House increases over distance and time: No Soup + d x t = hell
• I’ve learned that the less I know where I am and where I’m going the more I’m convinced that the taxi driver is taking me the long way. 
• I’ve learned that I don’t miss emails, in fact I’ve learned they are the bane of my very existence
• I’ve learned that there are few finer things in life than having an enormous bed all to yourself, and one of those finer things is being in bed with my girlfriend and my cat, even when they have colonised 95 percent of the horizontal space.

These findings are locked in but as I’m only half way through the trip, most of the way through the float, have tinges of homesickness, a pounding liver and a tiredness that grips my bones and clouds my eyes, I have really only learned one thing.

I am no longer a young man.